


Sleeping problems

by Katsunori



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: AU, Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:07:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27452491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katsunori/pseuds/Katsunori
Summary: Levi can't sleep at night well, but moving to a new place really helps.It's technically horror, but it's not scary.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 16





	Sleeping problems

**Author's Note:**

> I deeply apologise if my English is frustrating to you.

Levi got used to sleeping in a new place pretty easily — that was the only good thing that came with his constant insomnia, which he fought either with pills or keeping his eyes closed until the alarm clock went off. The second option was more popular: he had troubles trusting his sleep in doctors’ hands and their prescriptions, and he strongly believed that sleep was something not to mess up with by outside interference, so to say. It seemed like his old-fashioned method was even working — he managed to prolong his sleep from four hours to six just by forcing himself to stay in bed instead of immediately getting up and doing something around the house to pass time. “You house doesn’t need so much cleaning”, his colleague once had joked, and Levi couldn’t get this thought out of his head after that.

The new place, however, was very charming in its own, rural way, and surprisingly calm in comparison to his previous house; it was probably the thick forest, which started almost next to his small two-storey wooden cabin, that captured all the sounds of the outside world, creating the impression of time coming to a stop. The road wasn’t really that far away, Levi could hear passing cars with ease when he was outside, but inside the house the only sound he could catch was the leaves rustling quietly thanks to a gentle wind.

Maybe because of that wind and that quiet rustle Levi had finally been able to fall asleep immediately after turning the lights off on the first night. It wasn’t just pure luck — at nights after that he also slept like a baby. He continued to wake up six hours later, maybe a little bit earlier, but now he felt surprisingly rested, like he actually slept for the first time in his life. He still resorted to cleaning as a means of passing time though — some habits take a while to get rid of, but now Levi didn’t feel like he was trying to exhaust himself to force his body to sleep anymore. Two weeks after moving in he realised he forgot to unpack his sleeping pills, which were, obviously, no longer necessary. He put them back in the bag.

Getting up in the middle of the night wasn’t that unusual either: sometimes Levi needed to use the bathroom, sometimes he wanted to drink a glass of water. He kept forgetting to bring it to his bedside table, because he didn’t really need it that often. This time he did need it, though, so Levi pulled away the blanket without much enthusiasm. The nights here were somewhat cold, and the first few seconds being without it shook off his sleepiness more than he wanted to. It took another couple of seconds to find slippers under the bed, and as soon as he got up, he realised his neck was a little bit sore — nothing out of the ordinary when you’re middle-aged and overwork all the time.

A subtle gust of wind, probably not actually subtle in reality as the window was tightly closed, disturbed the leaves of the nearest tree and made Levi turn his head towards it. The view was pretty boring, according to his real estate agent, but to Levi’s taste: a small part of the porch, that wrapped the entire house, with a white bench and a small round table beside it, the night sky, and a bunch of nearby trees, some of which belonged to Levi and some — to the forest, and Levi couldn’t really tell which ones are which. The documents he was given should make it clear in case he wanted to cut one of them down, but Levi was uncertain why he’d want to do that at any point in the future.

His thoughts were interrupted by barely noticeable movement in the shrubs below the trees. Levi put his palms on the windowsill, trying to make out what was going on in the darkness, but it was almost impossible to see anything. Defeated, he looked much higher, to the left. Among tree crowns he noticed a set of unusual branches: lightly coloured, looking almost white in the dim light of the moon, that got constantly covered by thin clouds this slightly windy night, they seemed to have a pattern and were located at the same distance from one another, resembling a cage of some sort. Following them with his eyes, Levi looked deeper into forest, but the branches simply disappeared somewhere in the dark. The other end of these weird branches also disappeared, but in the nearest leaves, hiding among the trees that belonged either to Levi or the forest. Levi, now almost pressing his nose against the window, tried to better see what the branches looked like; his breath, fully visible on the glass because of that, didn’t really help.

The trees, however, had something better to offer him. As soon as Levi looked up a little bit further, he saw a face. He was pretty sure it was a face; no matter how much he blinked or tried to check the room to catch a small detail that would give away that all of this was just a dream, nothing really changed. He almost pinched himself, but decided against it: for some reason, it seemed like a dumb thing to do right now. The circumstances forced Levi to take a look at the face again, meeting its eyes, which, now that Levi looked at them directly, were dimly shining, hidden away even from the bright light of the moon. What surrounded them was darkness, like there was a pit around them, in contrast to which the leaves around the eyes and the darkness looked almost grey. Parts of the face were missing from Levi’s view, the only other thing that he could see clearly, more or less, was its lower half: a weirdly coloured chin, probably covered in muscles (the better way to put it was missing skin, but Levi wasn’t quite ready for that idea), and a set of small exposed teeth to both sides of the face. Its resemblance to humans put Levi off the most; if what he saw was at least more animalistic, it would’ve been much easier to accept. But staring at a deformed human face ticked off his primal instinct to run away and hide, as if that would help. Levi could only guess what size this creature was: if the face was probably one, one-and-a-half storey long, what would the rest of this creature be like? His fairly spacious house seemed so tiny right now.

Leaves rustled again when the wind blew, but this time Levi saw something else moving with them — it was long black hair that disappeared on the ground, mixing up with the grass. Still, he noticed that some strands of hair got caught in the bushes, pulling them in a rather rough manner from time to time. That was probably the reason he saw movement down there. Surprisingly, the solution to this mystery didn’t really make him feel any better.

Levi stepped away from the window and walked to the side, trying to catch if the eyes were following him. The irises of the creature were too pale and clouded to notice them move, and the overall lighting was extremely unhelpful: it felt like street lights weren’t even working tonight. Cautiously, Levi left the room and ran downstairs, stopping in the hallway for a minute to think. The idea to grab a flashlight and go outside and face that thing crossed his mind, but his gut feeling immediately told him not to even bother. Levi couldn’t even imagine what would happen if he did that, and he wasn’t very keen on finding out. Instead, he went to the kitchen and drank that hapless glass of water which woke him up in the first place.

Right now even the mere thought of going back to sleep — or, better to say, going back upstairs — seemed surreal. He knew well that it’s pretty hard to see his bed from the window up there, but he couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable nevertheless. Levi sat on the couch in the living room and turned on the TV, very quietly, so that he could still hear every sound in the house. Apparently, he fell asleep around the morning: morning news started without him noticing, and he woke up to some loud commercial.

The first thing Levi did after getting off the couch was going to the bedroom; he didn’t turn the TV off and even made it louder to remind himself that the world around him was still there, that it existed in the distance. Now, with the sun helping him see familiar objects and furniture around, Levi felt dumb — the whole giant face accident looked like a dream or something a sleep deprived mind would come up with, which didn’t even make sense, because he was sleeping soundly after moving here.

He wasn’t surprised to see nothing out of the ordinary outside: the porch with a bench and a table, the morning sky, and trees. Nothing that looked even remotely close to a weird cage or a creepy face, nothing hiding among the leaves. Upon checking the backyard, Levi could swear that not a single branch was broken, and that seemed highly unlikely, if he guessed the size of this creature correctly.

“ _It was just a dream_ ” excuse didn’t stick to Levi though, and when the night came, his decision was not to sleep this time. He stayed up until the morning, but the face was nowhere to be found. The next night he changed his strategy and stopped checking the window every hour, staying in bed for the most part, but when he did get up, the face still wasn’t there. The next night was the night when Levi gave up: he wasn’t trying to do anything, instead, he went straight to sleep, but it turned out his insomnia problem had returned.

His insomnia problem tortured him for the whole week until he suddenly was able to sleep properly again.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm extremely sorry for all the spelling and grammar mistakes, as well as for the weird selection of words and expressions because of my poor knowledge of English. Thank you for reading.


End file.
